


The Good Rebel King

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-07-04
Packaged: 2017-11-09 04:15:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They put a Hero on the throne to save Albion, but didn't bother to save him first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Good Rebel King

_“I don’t believe you understand.  
I didn’t want anyone to die. I didn’t want ANYONE to die, do you hear me?  
I hated the creature just as much as the rest of you! I wanted it dead! Gone!  
Why didn’t anyone see what was happening to me — I needed Albion as much as Albion needed me! A king is only as good as his people!  
Listen to me… I wanted to save everyone. You know what kind of person I was— I am!  
But I was weak! I couldn’t fight it!  
Th- The **dark** …”_

“A bit of this and he should be right as rain,” the apothecary told Sarah, pressing the vial into her hand and patting her shoulder in that overly-familiar manner of his. Sarah nodded, tearful and trusting, and rushed back to where her husband, the Hero, lay dead-eyed and lethargic in their bed.

Walter would sigh and drag his fingers through his whiskers, through his hair, murmuring about exhaustion and mental strain and the rigours of being Albion’s only Hero.  
Ben would just knit his eyebrows together with thinly-veiled worry, offer words of consolation to Sarah, who could only smile wanly and stretch out her body beside her husband, hoping her warmth would revive his spirit.

Eventually, the Hero sat up, looked around intelligently, and asked the date.  
And business resumed, because time waited for no man.

But the children playing stickball in Bowerstone’s alleys no longer threw rocks at him or attempted to trip him whilst he ran.  
The balverines in Silverpines skirted him restlessly before attacking, their large nostrils flaring as they caught the scent of something they weren’t sure they should fight.  
His genial, open visage shuttered, closed down, hatches battened as if preparing for a storm. His brow furrowed and hooded over sunken eyes, mouth turning down at the corners in a perpetual frown. Sarah hesitated before running to him during the times when he returned home, hovering near the walls until he shot her a wounded look. _“You act like you don’t know me anymore.”_

Still, Walter and Ben just clapped him on the back, told him it would all be over one day and the stress and strain would lift like clouds skittering away from the sun, and that he only need to _hold on_ and _keep fighting._

When Sarah found out she was with child, she cried.

The day the Hero took the throne, deposing his tyrannical older brother and paving a path for a new Albion, the crowds cheered because the occasion called for it. Later on, in their homes and in the taverns, fretful murmuring replaced the usual banter. “Somethin’s wrong wit’ that ‘un, too. Got that mad look in ‘is eyes.”

“Yeah, I ken it, an’ y’ know what else? Try lookin’ at ‘im sideways, not direct-like, y’know? ‘S like y’r third eye opens, or sum’in, shows y’ what’s beneath ‘im. He don’t look right, I’m tellin’ y’. ‘Least Logan looked _human.”_

Walter would make idle conversation in the war room. “Had me a dream that I was a lad again, ain’t that something. Had all my weapons and everything, though. Was like I was a miniature version o’ the way I am now. Heh…”

The Rebel King stared down at the three-dimensional map of Albion, touched a mountain peak with raw fingers. Where his fingertip landed, black sludge poured from the mountaintop like molasses from a jar. Walter saw, because he _knew,_ but he spoke not. And perhaps that was his fatal error, in the end.  
“I dreamt of Shadelight,” the king murmured.

Every night, he dreamt of Shadelight.

Page and Reaver duelled for his support every few months in the throne room. He was a mere figurehead, a puppet — he listened with a mind that had no thoughts, a heart that had no pulse. When he opened his mouth to make a decision, the Crawler’s voice spoke through it.  
But it was he, the King, who was blamed for the destruction of Albion’s quality of life. For the ominous décor in the castle, and how the walls appeared to be bleeding when the lights were low. For smog and dust and children being born with respiratory ailments, for Reaver’s increasing trigger-happiness, for the dead rotting and stinking in the alleys.

Just after he condemned Aurora to its inevitable fate, he grabbed Walter by the shoulders, and the tears that spilt from his eyes were the colour of ink.  
“Why are you letting me do this?” he rasped from a throat that tired of shouting.

“I cannot defy you,” he responded, and though it squeezed the heart in his chest like a vice, he refused to look away from that tormented gaze.  
“And I’m to stand behind you until I die.”

Albion raised an army like never before seen, funded by the food ripped from the mouths of babes and the books ripped from the hands of scholars and the children ripped from the breasts of widows.  
But that army did not fight for Albion.  
It fought for Albion’s king, and Albion's king merely fought to die.

Face-to-face with the creature that had poured black sludge into his veins and dead spaces where his eyes should have been, the king of Albion fell to his knees.  
Bowerstone burned around him.  
The keening, victorious cries of the Children blotted out all conscious thought as the king took up arms and charged.  
Possessed by the Crawler, it was still Walter and not his possessor who died.

The Crawler lived on.  
He lived on in the senseless murders of prostitutes in Bowerstone’s back alleys.  
In children ‘falling’ down mineshafts.  
In Theresa being struck blind yet again — unseeing and unhearing, mute and dumb, forever clawing at the sludgy blindfold over her third eye.  
In the assault on Reaver — the only man holding Albion together, in the best way he knew how — that drove the maddened Shadow-bound industrialist into hiding.  
In the suspicious absence of blessed sunlight, the light that kept Albion’s hope alive.

Those who were spared death sought it anyway, hanging from rafters, surfacing bloated and blue in the river, bleeding out on grimy wooden floors.

And their king? The _good Rebel King?_

It was Reaver’s ingenious invention, a recorder of voices, that carried his last, hysterical words for a new Hero to find.

_“If you find this, you ARE a Hero. Don’t doubt me! Don’t think twice about it! If you weren’t one, you wouldn’t be here!  
And you love Albion. Please… tell me you do. I did. I loved it more than I loved being alive.  
But I couldn't... I couldn't fight. I couldn't do what they asked of me.  
Because of the dark._

_**Everything** is dark, now. Dark and… and full of…  
…Please. Find Theresa. She will help you. She knows…  
Go to the Spire. Don’t listen to anyone that tries to keep you from it. Go there, and find her.  
If she can’t help you… then Albion is… is lost…  
No, don’t think about it. Don’t think about that! Just go. And do what you must, even if it means you must die.  
There is no nobler cause than dying for Albion.   
Yes... For **Albion** …” _


End file.
